One of my worst years so far, I had a bad accident and had to go to therapy, had a lot of family get sick or die of Covid19, got diagnosed with all sorts of serious health conditions and even a surprise surgery, fml. To make things worse, I was more shut in this year than I have been minus the first year I spent unemployed right out of college, so shut in hardly used any social media. Also got threatened by some drunk and armed out of towners that were going around harassing everyone that didn’t look white.

Only positive was I learned a lot this year, and put big dents in my reading and single player game backlogs. I tried being healthier this year diet and exercise, but you’d hardly be able to tell minus weight and some bloodwork numbers looking more sane. Bad, they say your health falls apart starting in your 30s and damn are they right.

This year is so bad I want to go back to the basics and be like eating 12 green grapes for New Year ritual shit, live up to my username you know, fuckers don’t even have green grapes thanks to shortages. Think I’ll use frozen blueberries since I got the last bag, and blueberries are way better than grapes anyway.

Alright, a bit of a mixed bag. The good stuff was after getting fired from a job I despised in 2020, I now have one I kinda enjoy. I don’t like managing people and I don’t have to do that here, and out of all the jobs I’ve had this one makes me feel the least exploited. The people I work with seem like genuinely good people. I feel more sure of myself and my beliefs. Started fully identifying as a commie in 2021 and finally turned my back on electoralism. There’s a trading card game I used to love that I got back into, it makes me really happy when I get time to sort cards. Started using Linux on my desktop and GrapheneOS on my phone, and just sorta disconnected as much as I could from capitalism. Became a vegan in 2021 so that rocks. There some other really good stuff but I can’t get into it without getting doxy.

The bad stuff is, I’m in my late 30s and I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have the same group of friends since high school. But 2021 was the year our friendships have really started to disintegrate and I get pretty bummed about it. COVID played a part but the bigger issue is that myself and a couple other people moved away in recent years. Turns out keeping friendships alive via chat groups when you were friends IRL for decades is really hard. Our discussions feel tired and we seem to go back and talk about the same things. Just kinda stale. And half of my friends barely participate. Board Game Arena has helped but it feels like a lot of my friends are just bored and not super interested in really doing what’s needed to keep our friendships going. Not to mention 2021 was the year I had to start gray rocking a formerly close friend. This guy was probably my bff for nearly 20 years. But he’s a pretty hardcore evangelical Christian and his political views have only gotten more reactionary over the last couple years. Decided just to limit our convos to baseball. I also barely exercised in 2021 and despite the veganism I haven’t eaten as healthy as I should have.

Nothing exciting but I feel like things are looking up. In 2019 my dad died so 2019 and 2020 were the worst years of my life. I think I’m starting to feel not totally dead inside. I started a new job recently that should provide many opportunities and I turn 30 in January so it feels like a new start.

CW: Suicide

What are your thoughts on 2021 in personal life and in general?

The only reason 2021 didn’t totally sever the social contract is that I still have people I care about in my personal life and I have to have some sort of restraint to not alienate them. I used to shoplift a decent amount because I’m white and not dumb, but this year it’s almost become a habitual thing. There was one time I tried walking out of the local Kroger with a bottle of Bacardi under my coat, and the store manager ripped it out of my hands and was an ass about it. I spent the next couple of days using fake texting apps to make calls to the customer service line, left bad reviews, complained to the employees there and got him shitcanned. Stimmybux got me back into wargaming after years of a hiatus because I couldn’t afford it. It’s very relieving to see that, for such a reactionary hobby (because it’s expensive and has fash-friendly lore most of the time), nobody gave a shit that I showed up looking like a Golden Girls cosplayer. That’s out the window with the covid spike, but I’ve been sure to prime my shit right on my apartment’s front steps, just blatantly leaving black and white paint streaks.

At my last job, I would just put trash in my manger’s desk or hide milk cartons around her office. I’d unplug shit all the time, we’ve had multiple times where all the breakfast food in our freezer (for the buffet we have going on during the pandemic) go bad because nobody checks it for days and I’d just let shit go bad so they couldn’t put stuff out and it’d waste the company’s money. If there’s not a camera in front of something (outside of the elevator for obvious reasons), I just tugged at it as hard as I could to see if I could break it, and a lot of times it broke. There are still machines that are just broken. The reason I left was that one of the guests (the CEO of some protestant cult or whatever) complained that I wasn’t nice enough to the ringworms who were staying at the hotel and that they’ve decided to cancel their contract, which cost the company a ton. I was asked to fill out an email saying how I won’t be mean to the guests in the future, and instead I waited until my next shift and then told her as soon as I got to the hotel that I quit. Later that night after getting hammered, I sent an email to corporate saying that she was trying to start a union. I don’t know the results of that, but I wouldn’t be betting on the future of a mermaid themed hotel with <10 people per night staying there.

I hate this country with every fiber of my being and it’s gotten to the point where the only way I can express it is through just doing whatever little I can to help shit break down faster. The snapping point really was at the end of last year when the last childhood friend that I had, who came out to me as a woman and was the most important person I had in regards to expressing myself as a nonbinary person, kill herself. That was the point where I started going into work visibly intoxicated and just mean. I’m just mean all the time, and if I’m not to someone, it’s because I’m busting my ass to avoid just screaming at them at how fucking insufferable everything is. It’s working, I’ve made friends and the only friendship I broke off was with a shitlib, but I sure to be as mean about it as possible, and kept sending little updates on how the Biden admin was doing until he blocked me. This year made me appreciate the US worker more than any other point in my ideological journey. To steal that chapo line from the Darius McCollum ep (I still cry thinking about that), if you’re making under $50,000 a year in this country, you’re a prisoner and should act like it. I used to say “I don’t even want this country reformed”, which is a hilarious line in hindsight because we couldn’t get it if we wanted (and you shouldn’t), and it’s not our decision. And if you’re the people making those decisions, or just making $200k at this point, you and everyone you’re connected to are Romanovs’s to me.

It’s obviously not praxis, it’s not bring about the workers paradise or a better living wage or whatever your goals are, but I can’t help but feel joy as things fall down. Going to a McDonalds and seeing them close at 7:00 PM gives me hope. Seeing 100+ boats on the west coast waiting to get unloaded is the light at the end of the tunnel for me. Barren shelves are cracks in the wall. I don’t want this place to continue anymore. I don’t have any family, I’ve never went to college and couldn’t afford it if I wanted (I don’t, if we’re being honest), but I need one if I could ever hope to afford a house. I got real close with the unemploymentbux, but then the housing prices blew up and I needed a new car because there’s no living in this country without one. I fucking hate driving so much. My mom died when I was 10 because she had to drive 45 min each day to get to work. But I gotta blow most of my cash to get this metal hunk of shit so I can sit in traffic and pray that I don’t get fucking sideswiped on my way to forced labor (wage slavery is slavery, I have an effective gun to my head demanding I work), doing something very much not important during a pandemic. Our society exists just so I have to keep going to that job. Excuse me for taking joy that you’re not getting a PS5 anytime soon, I fucking pray that not a single one after this last batch gets sold new.

You know the answer to this in your head. I have to say, for the sake of this website and the FBI agent reading this, I do not condone violence in any way. You can’t type it out here, and it really ain’t the website’s fault. Not like /leftypol/ or r/antiwork or breadnroses or this place could do something useful if they wanted to keep the place open. People don’t come to these places, places that I’ve made friends through, as workers but as members of a fandom, even if they’re politically involved and these places should be seen as such. Anyone who’s calling for violence right now is a fed, and none of the orgs can or want to organize that violence in a meaningful way against the state. It’s not their fault either, they’ll get Fred Hampton’d if they do something outside of the most basic harm reduction. That’s not gonna be forever, but it will be until the United States as a national goverment is in shambles and cannot allocate enough resources to kill us off (which is the goal through direct violent repression and policies like raising interest rates while allowing unemployment to expire, or all of our covid policies). The prospect of instability, the sort that I’m really afraid of and I’d absolutely be at the front of the line to get the worst of as an openly queer worker, is preferable to this going on for another week. If the outcome is I still don’t have my mom or friends and everyone that cares about it is getting sicker and poorer, why would I want this blight to go on any more. The United States is the most evil creation humanity has ever stumbled into and the guilt our ruling class has cannot be absolved. Even with their bougie medicine, they just wouldn’t have enough time to make up for what they’ve done. We’re worse than the Nazis, we’re worse than the current Japanese goverment (which is the same as the imperial Japanese goverment).

I’ll never vote in another election again, I’ll never put in a hard day’s work under any circumstance, and I will actively try to lower profits as much as possible. 2021 was the year that, for the sake of having something to look forward to in the distant future, I gave up on this country completely.